Allin Consulting often works with organizations on SharePoint upgrades. When appropriate, Allin can focus on an individual phase in the upgrade process to support the business. This is helpful when an organization is well-staffed for completing the work but is looking for expertise and support on high-risk activities such as pre-upgrade analysis and planning.
Allin typically does not recommend the in-place upgrade approach (where the existing farm is upgraded to SharePoint 2010) and instead recommends the “content upgrade” or “database attach” methodology, where a completely separate SharePoint 2010 farm is constructed apart from the existing 2003 or 2007 SharePoint farm. The reason for this is the high risk of long outage/downtime when doing an in-place upgrade. This stems from an inability to roll back or run the systems in parallel during the upgrade because the content upgrade approach keeps the current production environment available throughout the upgrade as a read-only system.
The farm’s capacity should be tested and based on the organization’s SharePoint implementation size and growth projections. It will be necessary to have a QA environment of this 2010 farm created to test aspects of the upgrade process and to support patching on longer ‘parallel’ upgrade scenarios where both the old farm and the new 2010 farm will live. The QA environment does not need to completely match production in terms of capacity or power but should match production from a patching and configuration perspective.
Questions for Upgrade Scenario:
The upgrade process for SharePoint 2010 is broken down into five distinct phases. In each phase, there are a number of related questions that that should be answered to increase the success rate for each phase.
1. Pre-Upgrade Analysis and Planning
This phase is about understanding the current and future environments and what changes may be needed to mitigate risks.
Infrastructure Questions:
What is the current version of SharePoint that is running in the enterprise? SharePoint 2003? 2007?
Are the latest service packs (for SharePoint, SQL, and Windows) in place?
Are the latest cumulative updates (for SharePoint) in place?
What is the current farm?
How many servers are in the farm?
Is there a QA environment for the current SharePoint implementation?
What is the future farm topology?
Is there a QA environment for the future SharePoint implementation?
How many SharePoint Web Applications do you have?
How many SharePoint Site Collections do you have?
How many databases do you have?
How large are these databases?
What is the current rate of growth for these databases? In particular, what is the expected growth rate in approximately one month?
How many SQL Server Instances do you have?
Are there any errors in any of the event logs on the servers?
Have you ever deviated from the default SharePoint settings? If so, when and why? Common examples are: changing the location where logs are stored, configuring search scopes and schedules, adding additional properties on user profiles, adding Excel-trusted file locations, etc. Many of these deviations are dealt with upon upgrade, but others require additional planning in order to ensure that anything dependent on these changes will not break or be impacted by the upgrade.
Staffing and Resource Questions:
Is there QA team?
If so, how are they structured?
Is this only for development?
Is this also for infrastructure support (such as testing after patches and updates have been applied)?
What resources will be involved in testing content?
Will business owners be responsible for sign-off?
Third Party and Related Technology Questions:
How many third party solutions, components, or controls do you have in your environment?
What are they?
What version of each of these components are you using?
Are you using ISA?
Are you using MS Forefront for SharePoint or another virus scanning solution?
What is the current version of Microsoft Office you are using?
Are you using Office Communication Server (or Lync)?
Are you using Microsoft System Center products? Which ones?
What version of Internet Explorer are you running? IE 6 has known issues with SharePoint 2010.
In addition to working through the pre-upgrade analysis questions, Allin can help make sense of the pre-upgrade analysis reports that the pre-upgrade checker (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262231.aspx) and SP TestContentDB (http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=288) provide.
2. Upgrade Testing
In this phase, specific content is collected from current production and brought over to the future environment. This should turn into a full-blown trial upgrade (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262155.aspx) to ensure no surprises happen during the real upgrade process.
3. The Upgrade
In this phase (typically in one weekend depending on the size of the content being migrated/upgraded), the actual upgrade is executed. Often Allin will be on hand as a SharePoint expert for the business in case any issues arise. Allin can help quickly revert the changes if an issue arises or overcome minor complications to ensure the upgrade can be accomplished within the downtime (or locked/read-only window).
4. Stabilize and Validate
During this phase, monitoring and checks are performed to ensure that the environment is running well and any user issues that come up are addressed quickly and efficiently. This phase typically continues until the business is satisfied that SharePoint is performing well and that the upgrade was (technically) a success. Allin is sometimes consulted to support a post-upgrade assessment to ensure there are no issues in the farm.
5. Change and Enhance
Many of the topics mentioned here should be considered and dealt with in the Pre-Upgrade Analysis and Planning. However, many organizations may use a new stable and upgraded environment as an opportunity to revisit necessary SharePoint staffing, solutions or information architecture enhancements.